Flawed data

A Congressional Budget Office report that the Navy used flawed data to select bases for closure or realignment might give Whidbey Island Naval Air Station a second chance at life.

But U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, DBremerton, is concerned that the information may be used as ammunition to close down the Everett home port instead.

Congressional investigators told a base-closings panel Friday that the Navy will end up with more space than it needs if the panel, lawmakers and President Bush go along with the service's recommendations.

Frank Conahan of the General Accounting Office told the panel that the Navy and Pentagon should provide the Base Closure and Realignment Commission with specific details about how it arrived at its recommendation to close nine bases and realign 17.

The Navy recommended closure of the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station near Oak Harbor, but also recommended all the new home ports the Navy has been constructing should be opened.

Dicks said he will be testifying before the base-closing commission Tuesday and will tell the panel that they shouldn't trade closing the Everett home port for keeping the Whidbey Island base open.

"I feel very strongly that the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station should remain open," Dicks said today. "But I feel just as strongly that we should keep going on the Everett base. It would be a mistake to close Everett just because we keep Whidbey Island open."

Dicks said he does not agree with the assessment that the Navy's base closing plan would result in the nation keeping too many berths open for ships that won't exist in the smaller Navy of the future.

But even if there are too many berths being maintained, Dicks added, "the rationale for an Everett home port is the strongest of all."

Dicks cited the strategic need for a Puget Sound-based carrier task force to protect both Alaskan crude oil shipments and the Bangor submarine base, home of eight Trident submarines that form the strongest leg of the nation's strategic nuclear "triad" -- the basing of nuclear weapons at sea, on land and in the bomber fleet.

He also said that the Soviet Union remains a presence in the north Pacific and that the U.S. Navy needs to have ships and sailors familiar with north Pacific waters.

Dicks said there should be six carrier battle groups based on the west coast, and that it would make the most sense for them to be distributed geographically, with two in Puget Sound, two at Alameda near San Francisco, and two based at Long Beach in southern California.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney recommended last month the closure of 43 domestic bases and the realignment of 28 others, including major facilities such as Fort Ord in California and the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.

The list drew criticism in Congress where a number of lawmakers complained that their local facilities were unfairly singled out. Members of Congress are certain to use the GAO testimony faulting the Navy in arguing to keep open naval installations in their states.

The Navy calculated that closing Whidbey and consolidating naval air operations at Lemoore Naval Air Station near Fresno, Calif., would cost less than $500 million in the short run and save money in the long run. A task force of Oak Harbor civic leaders maintains that the Navy grossly underestimated the cost of closing Whidbey, which they say would in fact be about $1 billion.

The GAO, in a 137-page report released Thursday and in Friday's testimony before the commission, said the Army and Air Force documented their selections adequately as part of a Pentagon base-closing process.

The Navy, however, failed to produce adequate data on its selections, making it difficult to assess the military value of the bases, the GAO said.

"The fundamental information was flawed," Conahan told the commission.

The Navy established a Base Structure Committee but found that the input from its working group favored keeping bases open, the GAO reported.

The Navy then turned to its various Navy and Marine Corps headquarters officials and representatives for recommendations.

"The data simply was not used by the committee that was set up. We don't know how those recommendations came out," Conahan said.

The outcome is that the Navy will have excess space to berth its ships even if recommended closures are accepted by Bush and Congress, the agency said.

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